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Mistral panic now joined by outright misrepresentation

Ariel Cohen’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the Mistral sale adds nothing to the previous neo-con screeds on this topic. It’s basically a mish-mash of every bit of anti-Russian fear-mongering one can squeeze into 800 words. Nothing surprising and wouldn’t have been worth commenting on except for one thing. Cohen states that Russia’s new military doctrine “lowers the threshold for pre-emptive nuclear strikes.” This is actually just a false statement. A sentence by sentence comparison of the text with the 2000 military doctrine shows that the threshold was actually raised slightly in the new edition, as I noted in a previous post. I have no problem with differences of opinion on the nature and extent of the threat posed by Russia to the rest of the world. But let’s stick to the facts and avoid outright lying about misrepresentation of what’s in published documents.

Update: Perhaps lying is too strong a word. I don’t actually know whether Cohen is lying or just hasn’t bothered to read the documents in question. So let’s change lying to misrepresenting. Either way, it’s sad that a reputable newspaper like the WSJ would print this without some fact-checking.

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3 thoughts on “Mistral panic now joined by outright misrepresentation”

I agree with Dmitry. Ariel Cohen has not done his homework. He has obviously not read any of the reports and commentary coming out of Moscow along with the simple language of the new Russian national security strategy. In misrepresenting that document, as Dmitry notes, he must have some other agenda in mind — possibly the constant desire of the Heritage Foundation to have that global missile defense system against the Russian nuclear forces (i.e., deterrent of our attack on them) so that the U.S. can carry out that first disarming nuclear strike on Russia that Daryl Press and Keir Leiber have been advocating and which was the dream of the old Cold Warriors and their SDI. This is very dangerous and confirms the Russian view of American aggressive intentions against them. It should also be borne in mind, as Dmitry and I have pointed out, that much of this nuclear stuff and depicting NATO as the enemy is a sop to old-line Soviet types in the Russian military, and has very little to do with the actual military reform taking place there, with its distribution of new brigades thinly along all the borders of Russia.